


Beauty and Family

by innocentsmith



Category: Sunshine - McKinley
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 02:59:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innocentsmith/pseuds/innocentsmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world of the Blaise family isn't one Sadie can live in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beauty and Family

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jo Robbins (plenilune)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plenilune/gifts).



> Many thanks to hangingfire, queen among last-minute betas.

"I was young and stupid," is how she explains it to Charlie, the first time. She feels she has to - he has a right to know at least a little of what he's getting into. "He was charming and...lonely, maybe. It was a match made in _somewhere_. I left in February last year, and I successfully haven't heard from any of them since. So now you know, and if it's going to be a problem you need to tell me now."

She tells him more in bits and pieces over the years, stray memories. Usually only when they're alone, setting chairs on tables in the coffeehouse after closing, or quiet moments on their days off when the kids are out playing and she's sitting drinking coffee and watching him work on his latest renovation. She doesn't say much, even then.

There are certain things Sadie doesn't want to speak aloud too often, names that, uttered, feel like they might conjure their owners back into the hard-won normalcy of her present life. This is not as ridiculous a idea as she'd like it to be. She's pretty sure some people have heard about her first marriage, the fact of it, through the strange gossip osmosis process that happens at the coffeehouse. They don't ask her outright, though, and as long as they aren't bringing it up within earshot of her daughter she's decided not to think too hard about who knows what.

It doesn't make any difference now, anyway. She's determined it won't make any difference for Rae.

* * *

She meets Onyx Blaise at a deli on East Chautauqua Street, about a week after she's started working there. It's the second job she's had since moving to Portsmouth; the tips were better at the fancy Sino-Frankish place, but she hated watching people fiddle with their food instead of eating, and the deli's closer to her tiny walk-up apartment. It's paneled with wood and brown tiles from the last century, dark and somber, and when she gets to know Onyx better she suspects that he finds that comforting.

Lida, the other waitress on the lunch shift, turns her back quickly and makes a face as he comes in, a dark-haired man in a good suit. He heads straight up to the second level without asking to be seated. Sadie gives her a sympathetic look. "Bad tipper?" The servers trade off taking tables as the customers come in, and normally they contrive to keep people from heading upstairs unless all the lower tables are full; the stairs are uneven, which the owner only gets away with by claiming the deli as a historic building, and it's a pain, sometimes literally, to try to rush hot chicken soup up and down two levels.

"He tips fine," says Lida, and then, leaning in, whispers, "That's _Onyx Blaise_."

Sadie's really not sure what expression she's supposed to have. She's heard of the Blaise family, of course, and read mention of them in the paper, but this is the first time she's come across the attitude about them peculiar to people raised in their city.

"He comes in a few times a month. Orders the same thing, reads his book, doesn't talk much," the other waitress goes on with grim relish, as though describing feudal atrocities.

"...Right. Sheer, okay? I can take him, if you want to get the next couple tables," offers Sadie. Lida gives her an odd look, but agrees.

He's perfectly polite. Sadie has trouble seeing the sinister implications of a cold turkey on rye, mayo no mustard, tomato salad on the side. He stays for about half an hour reading his book, smiles when he asks for the check - it's a nice smile, distant and kind of shy - and tips twenty percent. He's even, she thinks, a little good-looking.

She pretty much takes over him as a customer from then on. The fourth time he comes in, she brings him his iced tea as soon as he sits down, and when she says, "Hi, I'm Sadie, I'll be serving you," he says, "It does seem to be falling to you to do that, lately."

"I'm the new girl on lunch shift. And," setting the tea down, "I'm not afraid of you."

He gives a quizzical laugh. "I...feel I should do something dramatic in response to that news, but I'm not sure what."

Sadie tilts her head at the book he's holding, index finger keeping his place in the pages. They come in all sizes, but they're always covered in plain brown paper, and she's been dying of curiosity. "You could terrify me with your reading material."

He raises an eyebrow, and opens to the title page. _A Princess of Mars._ There's a man with a sword, and a girl gyrating.

"I can see why you'd want to keep that quiet."

He shakes his head, smiling again. "I got in the habit as a child."

"When you had to be stealthy, carrying around medieval grimoires at your prep school."

"Naturally. I suppose it makes books feel more like they're mine, if they're covered. Only I can see them."

"Sorry I asked."

"Oh no, don't be."

(That was the day, she thinks much later, the moment when she decided he was harmless. Which, to give Onyx whatever credit he deserved, he never actually claimed to be.)

Two weeks and four turkey sandwiches later, she's walking by the harbor on her day off, watching the seagulls squabble and trace circles in the air, when from behind her she hears someone call her name. She turns, and it's Onyx Blaise - the same suit, the same smile, his hair ruffling a little in the ocean wind.

Seeing him out in the light, she thinks, _He's really not that much older than I am._ He seems more _there_ than anyone around them - it's as if he's a figure in one of the 3-D viewers she had as a child, pushed towards her eye somehow, with a strange edge around him. It's hard to look at anyone else.

He's only looking at her.

\---

He seems to like giving her things. Scarves, flowers - she tells him if he produces a rabbit, she's out of there. He laughs, which always makes her feel like she's accomplished something, and the next time brings her a pair of gloves, much nicer than anything she'd buy for herself. It's all very sweet, and almost painfully old-fashioned. She doesn't know what she's doing, but she still can't find it in her to be afraid.

\---

"...She'd like to _meet_ me?" It sounds kind of dire, and she's not sure what to make of Onyx bringing up _his mother_ while they're in bed, but. "Okay. When? Where? How?" She was drifting off, but now she's waking up fast, and his hand that she was holding loosely she gives a quick, nervous squeeze.

He drops a kiss on her shoulder. "Dinner, perhaps."

"A restaurant? Or she could come here, I could cook." She _can_ cook, even if she doesn't often like to. "Or..." She's never been asked to the Blaises', though she's passed by it, of course: a huge brick house, surrounded by a heavily fenced- and hedged-in park, dropped in the middle of the aging steel and molded concrete downtown.

"I have a cabin about an hour from here, by a lake," says Onyx. "I thought we might spend the weekend, and she could visit one evening. She doesn't go out much in public, and it would be neutral ground for both of you."

"What are we doing, signing a treaty?"

She feels him smile against her neck. "I think you'll like each other."

\---

Sabelle Blaise is tall and dark, like her son. She wears a long skirt and ballet flats, with her hair loose to her waist. She in no way looks old enough to have given birth to Onyx, and it's really rather disconcerting. Nevertheless, she and Sadie do, as predicted, like each other.

"I hope you will forgive us some of our oddities," says Onyx's mother. "The old magic-handling families do tend to develop quirks of behavior - a certain secrecy about our business, for example. Clannishness. It's defensive, but we don't mean to keep _everyone_ out."

Sadie, flattered, assures both the Blaises she understands. And she does, she really believes she does. Even if the big magic-handling families (it's odd hearing it said out loud, instead of implied and hinted at - she feels very worldly) don't occupy a lot of time hurling fireballs or whatever at each other these days, old habits die hard, and people with certain last names still get more than their share of attention and suspicion from the press. Of course they're a little standoffish at first, of course they want their privacy.

It's a gorgeous evening. Sadie brought cheesecake from work, and they take their plates out onto the porch. The sky is turning the deep blue of a slag marble, and the lake water laps gently, persistently, at the edge of their hearing.

"Sadie," says Sabelle, bringing something out of her pocket, unfolding the velvet wrapping and holding it out to her - an odd, almost luminescent chain necklace. It's lovely, and Sadie is reaching for it before Onyx's mother is even done speaking. "I hope you'll accept this. And please know that you are welcome in my home."

\---

Sadie's family goes _stark raving nomad_. She stops even taking her aunt's and her father's calls.

\---

Onyx seems determined to defy every truism about grooms' disinterest in wedding plans. Every wedding Sadie's ever been to or heard of was at a local temple or grove, hired for a few hours' time. (Well, aside from her uncle Jimmy who married his third wife at sea, on a steamer crossing over the Atlantic. He used to make a lot of jokes about needing to have the wedding there on account of Auntie Sheila being some sort of were-seal, which nobody thought were very funny. Especially Sheila, who left him after a few years, to no one's great surprise. But that's beside the point.) The Blaises have a small temple they actually _own_, as a clan, several hundred miles away, and Onyx is trying to arrange what appears to be a moderately-sized circus to go along with it.

"Onyx always has loved ceremony," says Sabelle, fondly. "Don't let him run away with things, my dear, if the fuss is making you uncomfortable."

Sadie thought she liked fuss and traditions, too: she was always the one at her house who put up holly for Midwinter and tried to get people to sing. And it isn't as though the wedding has to live up to any of her relatives' expectations. Only one of her sisters is coming. But her sense of the ridiculous occasionally intervenes.

"Oh please," she says when she's shown the chalice they're supposed to share wine from. It's bumpy with jewels, and large enough to hold a soccer ball or possibly a small child. "And then I suppose a pair of matched black dragons will whisk us off in our golden chariot to Oranhallo."

The Blaise cousin who's been _assigned_ to help them put together the wedding blinks at her.

Onyx wraps his arms around her from behind, and she can feel the laughter shaking in his chest. "Ah. I'm...afraid the cup isn't negotiable, Sadie. But I take your point."

\---

It's so _quiet_ at the Blaise house. There are more people living there, theoretically, than in any other home Sadie's ever had; in her family young people move out into their own places when they reach eighteen - they go to the city, as she did, or at least get their own apartments. It's a point of pride. But the house where she grew up was always full of people, neighborhood kids wandering in and out, uncles and aunts arguing in the kitchen.

It's not that any of the doors are ever locked to her. No one's ever less than friendly. She certainly doesn't feel that anyone's avoiding her, and gods know she's got enough to keep her occupied. But there are times - late at night, or odd snatches of the afternoon - when she finds herself wandering the house, and she feels like she'll never come to the end of the rooms and halls. She'll never come across another living soul.

\---

"I don't know what's going on with them," says her sister, the one that's talking to her, on the phone. "I didn't think they were so skegging _freaked_ by magic handlers. They never have been. Remember Zane Dinesen, who used to twist charms for luck on tests and sell them in the boy's locker room? He always came to my birthday parties - they never had a problem with him. They never said a thing about it."

"Do you think it's because the Blaises are so...?" What word would you even use?

"_I_ think it's great," says her sister. "Like a fairytale."

"Which one?"

"Which what?"

"Which fairytale?"

\---

Two days before the ceremony, she goes to her old apartment to clear out the last of her stuff. She's not taking that much - pictures and letters, books from her childhood she'd like to have for her own kids.

Her mother's there. "I thought. We were all so sure you knew, but. I had to be sure...I just couldn't imagine you would take that kind of chance..."

Sadie's nerves are shot to hell for the day before her wedding, but nobody seems to notice anything wrong. Maybe that's how they expected her to be acting.

She doesn't let herself think about it.

(_"Why did you think I knew?_ How was I supposed to know when _nobody ever told me_? I can't," she said, gripping her head in her hands. "I _can't_ break it off, not now. I won't.")

Details are vague on how the bad-magic cross works. The statistics are probably grossly exaggerated, and after all it's only a little very distant genetic heritage on her side. It could just be a family story, no more significant than Auntie Sheila the selkie.

She won't let it be true.

* * *

Even in retrospect, it's hard to tell when it started. You'd think she'd be able to map it out, say, "There was the time I saw his picture in a news magazine, attending some kind of summit I hadn't even heard of. When I showed him the clipping, he looked at it as though it hadn't been worth my noticing, as though he were humoring me."

Say, "One day a big arrangement of flowers arrived, and my sister-in-law stopped me before I got the box open. I never found out where they came from, but afterward all the mail that came to the house had to be checked before it was given to us."

Say, "I never knew where people were. They'd go away for weeks, and then come back with no stories about where they'd been. I never knew who I'd see the next morning at the breakfast table."

There's a night when the Wars are at their height: she and Charlie are sitting on the couch at home, watching newstape of the first boats of refugees arriving from Albion. "We went there once," she says, gazing at the faces on the screen, not looking over at her husband as she speaks. "We went to Caledonia, too, and Eire. I never knew why - he'd ask me if I wanted to go with him, and there was always someone to go with me on a guided tour of museums and monuments, and never an explanation of what we were _doing_ there. I always had a wonderful time. But after a while I started staying at home."

Charlie puts his arm around her, and smooths her hair.

Most of the world missed the signs that the Wars were coming out of ignorance and overconfidence. Sadie was just too busy convincing herself she was happy.

* * *

"You need to tell me what is going on," she says to Onyx. "Your family is not letting me leave the house."

He looks away from his combox and frowns, in a very good imitation of concerned surprise that might have worked a year ago. "Someone told you you had to stay inside?"

"No! No. Every time I have an errand, someone does it for me. Every time I plan a day out, someone heads me off at the door." She hears the words as they come out, but she isn't going to let sounding like a lunatic stop her once she's gotten started. "I've been...preoccupied about the pregnancy. I tried to believe I was paranoid. But I am _not stupid_, Onyx. I have not been outside those gates in almost three weeks now. That is not normal, not for anyone not wearing a crinoline and carrying smelling salts."

"I could get you a crinoline," he suggests. She stares at him, the curve of his mouth, his well-shaped hands where they lie on the desk, all the things she's always found so fine about him, and tries not to cry.

"It's not fair, Onyx," she says after a moment. "You have to know this isn't fair to me."

He looks away, the trace of a smile disappearing. "Everything I could say requires so much...background." He glances back at her, and seeing her expression, hastens, "I never meant to distress you. I suppose I've been playing for time."

She never knew he could _play_ this way at all. "Give me _anything_."

"There is a great deal of...unrest, at present. Certain underground groups are proving to have more influence than...than any among the major families had anticipated, and as one of the _de facto_ leaders of my clan, I have responsibilities. Alliances are being called into question. There are..."

"What the carthaginian hell does that mean?"

"It means you're not safe," he says quietly. "And any child known to be mine is likely to become a target."

It takes a moment to sink in, part of her protesting that that just isn't the way the world works, what century does he think this is? while another, almost smug voice inside says _you knew this. You knew it had to be something like this._

"You think there's going to be some kind of, of political uprising...?"

"Well. Depending on how you define 'political.'" His eyes meet hers. "I'm not talking about human beings, Sadie. Not primarily."

\--

She stays in what she's told are safe locations. (Some of the Blaises seem so _relieved_, and she has to wonder, grimly, what sort of farcical goings-on there were behind the scenes to keep her happy and unaware.) It's only for the length of the pregnancy, she's assured. She has a doctor and a healersister-midwife on call.

_At least,_ she thinks numbly, _at least they'll be able to tell if there's anything wrong with it. Her. The baby._

* * *

"I told you. Daddy's meeting with a _business associate_," she says, and is unable to keep the bitter sting from her voice in the latter two words.

Raven's face is stormy, that expression between crying and temper fit Sadie has gotten to know so well, even before her daughter could speak. She used to be so much more able to deal with it. "But I want to see him! Just for a minute?" She clutches the spatula in her small fist as though contemplating mayhem if wheedling doesn't work.

"I know! I know you do. But you can't." Sadie hates this, she hates not having an answer for her daughter's questions. She hates not being able to let her child be alone in her own home. "Not right now. I'll take the cookies up to him, I promise, but you..."

"But they'll get _cold_," Raven says woefully. "I want to see him, want to see him, want to see him, now now now now..."

Sadie's gotten used to wearing dark glasses when she goes out. She's gotten used to not understanding half the conversations going on around her, because at least they are going on instead of cutting off abruptly when she enters the room.

She can't get used to the stubbornness of a four-year-old. "Rae, I can't - " she presses a hand to her forehead. "Would you just stop? Please, _stop_!"

"Sadie?" asks a voice, puzzled, from the doorway.

"Gran!" shrieks Raven, and barrels across the room, still waving the spatula, to throw her arms around Sabelle's long skirts.

For two goddamns, Sadie would do the same. It's been _months._ Her mother-in-law is a comforting presence in the room; she looks a little tired, but so much _herself_ that Sadie feels steadied.

"We made cookies! You should have one, _I_ think, Gran. They're good. They're chocolate chip - "

"I see that. You're all sticky, child."

"I am! Mom won't let me take them up to Daddy."

Sabelle raises her eyebrows, and Sadie makes a face in response. Sabelle sighs. "Well. Your mother's quite right. And it's getting a little late for you, isn't it?" Forestalling the start of a scowl, "Why don't _I_ take you up for your bath, and you can tell me about what I've missed. What have your tutors been teaching you?"

Watching the two of them disappear hand in hand up the back staircase, Sadie lets out a long breath. The cookies sit in rows on the cooling rack; she gives them an accusatory glare and then gets a plate and begins piling them up.

The first thing she notices as she comes through the door, following her husband's voice, is this: _something is missing from this room_. The big bejeweled cup-thing, she realizes, her eyes drifting slowly, reluctantly up from its usual spot on the ridiculous minature dias - isn't it funny, she thinks, how you always do notice little things that are wrong first - to her husband's back, standing straight with his hands clasped behind him at the opposite door. He's ushering out his business associate, who. Who is a.

Emerald green eyes, glinting, flicker over her. The creature inclines its head at her - it would be an almost courtly gesture, if everything about the movement, the physics of it, the way it shifts the space around it, weren't so terribly _wrong_. Sadie steps back from the doorway.

Onyx finds her in their rooms some unnumbered minutes later, sitting with the plate in her lap. He pauses, expression cautious - but no more so than it usually is these days around her. He didn't see her downstairs.

"Did Raven bake those?" She nods. "Well. This is turning into quite a hobby for her, isn't it? I'll have to remember to thank her in the morning."

She should come up with some response. She just can't think of anything to say, and then he's sitting down beside her, taking the plate away, touching her arm. "Sadie? Are you all right?"

"No," she says.

He inhales, and leans towards her - she thinks he's going to kiss her, and she can't process how she feels about that, but instead he presses his forehead to hers, cupping her cheek, tracing the rim of her ear with his thumb. _This is who you are_, she thinks. _This is who you always were. Onyx Blaise, hello._

"I know - I know it's been hard, dearest. I'm so sorry. I wish everything weren't so - Sadie, maybe sometime, sometime soon, we can go up to the cabin again? We'll have a few days up at the lake, the three of us. Would you like that?" He brushes kisses over her eyelids, light as a ghost. "I wish there were more I could do. I only want to protect you, and everyone."

She finds her voice. "Yes. I know." He kisses her, familiar as air, and she thinks, _Goodbye, goodbye._

* * *

"'Morning, Sadie. Hi there, Sunshine. Whatcha reading today?"

"The _Blue Fairy Book_," says Rae, standing on tiptoe and leaning to look past Charlie. "Can I go..."

"Behind the counter? Sorry, kiddo, not today, your mom and I need to be working out here. Anyway, kitchen's all closed up. Nothing for you to play with."

"Sorry, Charlie. It's just, it's a sunny day, and I can't keep her inside..."

He waves the apology aside. "I assumed you'd bring her. I mean, it's your day off, you're helping me out..."

She fixes him with a skeptical eye. "For which I am being paid."

"For which you are being paid handsome amounts of overtime," he agrees easily. "Hey Sunshine, can you do me a favor? See that lady digging over there? That's Mrs. Bialosky, she's planting a garden for us. Can you take these brownies over to her for me? And you can ask her to give you some of the lemonade in that cooler."

As Rae heads off, brownies in hand, to their terrifying regular customer, Charlie gestures towards a disorganized morass of paperwork dumped out on table eight. "It's all over there. Everything I could find, including the last four years of taxes. You're sure you know how to do this?"

"I am a waitress of many talents. I told you, I spent four months apprenticed to my uncle the accountant till I figured out what I really wanted to do was feed people." Sadie begins poking through the papers, until a loud pop distracts her. "You're opening champagne?"

"I'm opening champagne. One of these days," he says, bringing down two water glasses, "I will be able to afford to stock champagne, and also buy champagne glasses. Was this the uncle who was married to the were-seal?"

"No, a different one. Why champagne?"

"Relax, I'm not trying to get you drunk at nine a.m., in full sight of your daughter and one of the pillars of the community. I just thought you might need a drink if you're going to be looking through my accounts."

"You're not wrong about that." She takes the glass he offers, and a chair, and immerses herself in numbers.

When she looks up again, Charlie's looking out the window at Rae in the fledgling garden, with her book. "She's a bright thing, isn't she?"

"Yes," says Sadie. And then, abruptly, and without quite knowing why, she confides, "The Blaises found us. The charms I bought to hide us expired, apparently. Or they weren't good enough."

Charlie turns back, hands in his back pockets, brow wrinkling. "And?"

"Her father's sent her two postcards," she says. "Her grandmother...wants to see her." Charlie hmms. "She says Rae may need to see someone. In case she's...well..."

"Inherited anything, yeah, I can see that. Do you trust her?"

For a moment, she thinks he means Rae. "I - oh." Sabelle. "In a way I do. As much as you can trust any of them." Sadie stands, and looks out at her child reading in the sun. "I told her I'd think about it," she says. "I guess I can do that much."


End file.
